Easy way for client to create or make dropdown menus

Publishing help Editor
1

Hi all,

I have a client who sells software, and often they have software updates; in this case, they refer to them as changelogs (see the image below).

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I’m unsure about the best solution to integrate this into their new site. I want them to be able to create these themselves with ease, so I’m not forced to add a new dropdown menu each time. They currently have around 30 software systems, so this could become quite tedious.

I considered that the only way to achieve this might be to build a CMS collection, add around 50 blank dropdown spaces, and let the client fill them in…

I’m out of ideas, and I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for. Any help, tips, or other Webflow templates that address this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks!
Adam!

Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

2

I’d think of them more like blog entries.

So your DVR Examiner Version… is the title of the blog.
Then just have a text field for the inside of the dropdown, like you would a description of a blog.

You’d have the CMS structured as individual dropdown items, then just display that collection. Each time they create a new CMS item, it’ll create a new dropdown

3

A bit like this

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2 Likes
4

David’s nailed it.

To add a little more, I looked up the site to see what’s in the dropdowns, and it’s purely documentation, like this;

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So the approach I’d use is-

  • create a CMS collection called Product, which contains e.g. DVR Examiner and other products
  • create a CMS collection called Changelog, which contains e.g. DVR Examiner 3.16 Released 2024-10-24 it has a single-ref to the Product collection so each Changelog

Looking at other products like Verify [Medex], there aren’t any strict rules on the Changelog titles, so I’d keep it as plaintext, but also store the date separately for sorting.

That means the Changelog collection would contain;

  • Name - e.g.
  • Entry - richtext field, containing the content of the changelog entry
  • Date - the date of the release, primarily for sorting
  • Singleref - to Product, so that you can easily group your changelogs by product
1 Like
5

This is great thanks guys!

The only problem I have now if Im unable to disconnect the CMS collection lost from what I have called my product list (Softwares)

Do I need to build this from scratch and re-link too the new Changelogs CMS list?

https://preview.webflow.com/preview/demux?utm_medium=preview_link&utm_source=designer&utm_content=demux&preview=2a9a80f870a86efb5d6a811cf45d62d6&pageId=675ad4348c6bff05e9afe5fa&itemId=6776c0da94fb6d27fd94584d&locale=en&workflow=preview

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“Softwares” is fine if you like that. If you prefer “Product” you can just rename your collection. Note Product is also reserved by ECom so you might actually have a restriction there.

But to your question on copying your CMS template design to another CMS template-

This is one of the most awkward UX’s in Webflow; when you have content bound to a collection, that content loses its ability to be freely copy-pasted to other pages / sections within the same project. It’s “locked” until you unbind it.

You need to remove all of the references, and there are a few ways to do that. I’ve done a few tutorials on this, because it’s a pain-in-the-butt.

The basic unbinding…

And a walkthrough of the entire copy-page-layout process…

1 Like